Aaron W. Voyles bemoans the masculinity of beer.
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What is it about being a college male that makes liking good beer so difficult? Yes, money is a factor, but I don’t remember being quite Evil Eye broke in college. And yet, Evil Eye is what I purchased. Indeed, Ojo Malo was my brew of choice and was one that I showed off at parties.
I remember that I boasted about drinking Steel Reserve 211 and claimed Corona was a beer for pansies. (Interesting side note: Steel Reserve actually is rated higher than Corona.) I owned an Olde English hat at one time. College, for me, involved an odd phase of being both really excited and extremely militant about awful beer. And it wasn’t just me.
Eventually, the guys moved on from beer. It wasn’t economical. If you only had a mini-fridge in your dorm room, there wasn’t really a good way to store a lot of it. So then the quest moved to hard liquor. Heaven help the man who came back with Bailey’s to make a decent tasting drink. You had to buy Bacardi 151, and later, Everclear. Have you tasted Barcardi 151 or Everclear straight? They are awful.
But the point of course was never taste. The point of college beer and booze was to get drunk as quickly as possible for as little money as possible. The better you were at that, the more pride you had. Being able to “puke and rally” equaled a type of manliness. The person drinking a Smirnoff Ice was a sissy met with homophobic remarks. (Second side note: Smirnoff Ice is also not very good.)
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Why was there this hierarchy of drinking skill? I return to the work of Arthur Chickering (1974) and establishing competency. I had a quest to stand out through having the most obscure, cheapest, and crappiest beers. Within the context of my male group of friends, Evil Eye is what would make me memorable in a way that others were not. I might not be as strong as my fellow hall mates, but if they drank Corona, then I at least had a leg up on them somewhere.
This led to me hating beer. I began to believe that beer was for getting drunk and not for flavor. Guys traded taste and appreciation for watered down, low carb drunkenness. When you don’t appreciate something, that’s when it is likely to be abused. That’s where many people throughout my college years took it. It ended up with discipline problems, grade problems, unhealthy bodies, and more.
Hating beer actually worked for me though. After some time away from it, I have been able to develop an understanding of the flavor profiles and the nuances of beer and actually enjoy them now that there’s not a pack of guys to impress at every turn. Austin is home to some creative breweries, and I have enjoyed getting to know these places and their craft.
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The purpose of this article is not to condemn drinking in college, though it so often can be a distraction or worse for college men. It is also not to call for a lowered drinking age, claiming that to do so will allow men to ease into drinking and respect it more. That is a debate for people with far more expertise than I have.
I write this article just to reflect upon my experience and my need to develop competency and how the baggage of that need to appear masculine has stayed with me for so long. The need to have an Olde English to establish manliness shows how the negative impacts of the collective socialization of men have crept into even the most trivial of our daily exercises. To dig out will take our realization that this is happening and perhaps a willingness to order something with an umbrella in it.
Chickering, A. (1974). Commuting versus resident students: Overcoming educational inequities of living off campus.San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Ditching the Dunce Cap is a weekly Friday column from Aaron W. Voyles on the University of Texas-Austin. He welcomes your comments. This column is not affiliated with the university.
—Photo Quinn Dombrowski/Flickr
Also in Ditching the Dunce Cap:
An Ode to My College Roommate
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Examining the Axe Effect
When Will You Grab Your Saw?
Do You Know the Mega-Dump?
If the Shoe Fits, Cheat